On Negativity and the Explication of Perfectivity

Abstract

The review of some major studies of aspect in English has shown that there is no agreement among aspectologists about the scope in syntactic terms of the compositional mechanism for explicating the perfective/imperfective contrast. In spite of a number of proposals put forward by different authors concerning the degree of the alleged non-involvement of (syntactic) subjects, of certain kinds of adverbials, etc. in the explicatioon of aspect, in other publications the aspectual interpretation of sentences has been shown to be influenced by the entities mentioned. Negation, however, depending on the point of view, has either been regarded as a basic factor interfering with the rules of the compositional explication of perfectivity or as an aspectual marker in itself, a marker of imperfectivity.